WASHINGTON (CBS DC)  A substantial number of young, single Americans have a solid financial incentive to forego the Obamacare health insurance exchanges  a trend that could send the federal health care program into a death spiral.

According to a new study from the National Center for Public Policy Research, a large number of single people between the ages 18-34 who do not have children have a substantial financial incentive not to cross-subsidize older, sicker Americans covered under the health care system. Without the younger generation purchasing through the exchanges, the exchanges will quickly dry up.

The best thing opponents of Obamacare have going for them is Obamacare. The implementation glitches and the ensuing delays have created a perverse system: Individuals must purchase insurance with no out-of-pocket cost cap while employers are under no obligation to provide insurance. Aside from the gross unfairness and the difficulty in rolling out the plans (e.g. exchanges arent set up, there is no guarantee personal information will be protected, the centrality of a corrupted IRS) Obamacares debut is bringing home several unpleasant realities.

When the jobless rate for the youngest workers is approaching 22%, how the heck does Obama think they can afford health insurance? They are living with mom and dad and are lucky to get a part time job, so there is no chance they will be able to pay the bill that Obama and the Democrats have stuck them with.

The problem with the liberals’ idea that the failure of Obamacare will lead to single-payer is that the voters are going to be seriously pissed by the substantial rise in health insurance premiums. The DNC has had their bite at the apple, so to speak, and now why should the voters trust the Democrats to muck up the system again?

What is more, how is adding 30 million people to the health care system without adding doctors, nurses and hospitals going to bring down the price of health care?

What Obamacare does is increase demand, while doing nothing to raise supply. How is the price of health care supposed to go down?

It’s about like the open-borders lobby on the subject of household incomes. Household incomes in the US have stagnated for 10+ years now. How is adding a huge new supply of cheap labor going to increase wages, and therefore household incomes?

Or arranging for many more kids to enter college. The government arranges for millions more kids to enter colleges, no increase in faculty or colleges, and the price is supposed to come down how?

On and on and on. There’s a whole lot of people in DC, both conservative and liberal, who are peddling very large-scale, yet very simple economic assumptions that cannot possibly be true. In all cases, they’re ignoring large scale applications of supply and demand.

In health care, they’re all assuming that doing something to permit demand to go up will result in prices going down. That’s not how supply and demand work.

In labor markets, the open-borders lobby is campaigning for huge influxes of labor, while peddling the lie that this flood of labor (supply) won’t result in prices going down in a job market where demand (new jobs) isn’t increasing.

Actually, the Law of Unintended Consequences may be at work. I spoke with my son, an insurance specialist who works in Obamacare/Medicare, and a doctor who has campaigned actively for health care reform (of the right kind) for years. They agree that what MIGHT happen is that as more private insurance companies leave the market, the hospitals will begin to offer their own "hospital only" insurance, sort of like GMAC with Chevys. Big Pharma would still be opposed, but two of the three who supported Obama, hospitals and doctors, would likely be on board this because they are screwed if Obamacare is implemented. And it cannot be implemented because it is utterly unworkable.

Even trying to roll out "baby steps" has been a miserable failure. There is no way this comes out as planned.

The State’s Role
One thing that does not get talked about with Obamacare is that it is NOT insurance.

If you cannot pay the amount the government decides that the IRS will take from you, then you will be placed into your states welfare roles. And if you get sick, and require care, the state will pay...

...THEN THE STATE WILL GO AFTER ALL YOUR ASSETS TO COVER THE COSTS. AND YOU OR GRANDMA WILL LOSE YOUR HOUSE OR OTHER BELONGINGS.

There is no good side to Obama care and making sure people were covered more than they are now is not what it does.

OBAMACARE MAKES SURE THAT THE MEDICAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX HAS INCOME FROM TAKING HOMES AND ASSETS FROM PEOPLE.

DO NOT FORGET THIS

________________________

Note from CNS News

People whose household income is too small to qualify for the subsidy will be put on Medicaid. People whose household income exceeds 400 percent of the FPL will get no subsidy at all.

According to the IRS, which responded to a CNSNews.com inquiry on the issue, a household earning an annual income that is just $1 more than 400 percent of the FPL is ineligible for an Obamacare subsidy, period.

As explained by both the IRSwhich wrote the regulation governing the Obamacare subsidyand the Congressional Research Service, which published a July 31 report on the matter (Health Insurance Premium Credits in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), the Obamacare insurance-premium subsidy essentially works as a cap on the percentage of annual income an eligible person is required to pay in health-insurance premiums.

Bottom line here is that this’ll be a test case for just how dumb the average Obamadroid is. If low information voters aren’t as stupid as Zero’s counting on them being, the exchanges won’t work. I almost feel guilty that they’re going to spend the next twenty years of their lives providing benefits for me, but only almost.

death spiral is by design. It was planned that way. The goal is single payer, and a death spiral is a perfect crisis from which to present a single-payer solution”

Agree, but how do the Marxist Rats get there? Won't it take take multiple Congressional votes to make that change? I don't see the political capitol that the Rats would need to make the change. They have bought the farm with the majority of the American people just for the ACA.

The point where insurers switch sides is going to be the crisis point. If OCare can’t come up with a way to buy them off in whatever system follows OCare, they’ll torpedo it. The “single payer” will either be an insurance company, or there won’t be one.

My college son visited his NJ friends family. In 2012 they voted for Obama and thought Obamacare was good till reality hit. The friends father almost lost his good union health insurance, his friends mother lost hers as the place she worked at cut her hours to 29. The friends sister just lost her job because the place she worked at want to keep the number of workers below 50. They are pissed and angry at Obama, and probably will sit out of the elections in 2014. They are not ready to vote GOP but will boycott Dems, they basically do not trust politicians. IMHO many Dem blue collar will sit out of the election in 2014. It will help the GOP in short run, but in long run not help because these blue collar voters are available if the right Dem candidate comes along. Biggest challenge to GOP is to win these Dems over. Stop catering to corporations and Wall Street will be a good start. Supporting unabash globalism and free trade without weighing its degree of social disruption against its benefits would be a good place to start. If free trade and NAFTA is sooo good for America, why is the middle class shrinking and incomes stagnated for 10+ years before 2008 financial implosion, while Wall Street and CEO got richer and richer?

If the fine for not getting insurance is less than the cost of buying insurance they will just pay the fine, THEN when they eventually get sick or hurt, THEN they will go get insurance which the insurance companies are MANDADATED by law to give to them even with a pre-existing condition!

But unpopularity alone won’t stop the single-payer freight train coming down the tracks. Once the low-information voters have been shown the “utopia” of eliminating preexisting conditions, there’s no going back to the days when insurance companies could operate like, well, insurance companies and not offer a free ride to everyone.

The National Health Service in England is quite unpopular in public opinion polls, with all the horror stories coming from the brutal and decrepit hospitals. But the brain-dead British people, euthanized by big-government, will not give up socialized medicine. Instead the National Health Service is celebrated in Orwellian fashion at the summer Olympics.

Who picked ages 18-34 to study people not buying insurance? What about older healthy people?

The entire premise of Obamacare is that the 18-34 cohort -- which is the least likely to buy health insurance -- would end up paying for either a.) the low income premium subsidies with their tax penalties or b.) the discounted premiums for older healthy people.

Somebody has to pay the freight...and it was 18-34's who were nominated.

Consequently, if they don't cooperate, the scheme collapses into a pile of excrement.

Obama thought delaying the employer mandate till 2015 would delay what the employers do before mid term elections. WRONG! Companies plan ahead and are already gearing up and making announcements to accomodate “Obama no care” now. Companies are also informing employees as to why they are making their decisions. Mid term elections are going to have some ticked off voters.

The government still needs insurance companies to administer the plans, ie create plans, determine benefits, collect premiums. What the Feds want to do is in effect nationalize them, just like the banks. The insurance companies could become a regulated monopoly, like a national utility, with a specified profit.
I think the key is to implode 0-care. This can be done by individuals not signing up for the exchanges and gaming the system when sick. That way, insurance companies will exit the market before they can be effectively nationalized. Yes, there will be a vacuum, but instead of necessarily leading to a total government run system, free market solutions, supported by state initiatives, could fill the void.

46
posted on 08/25/2013 8:05:45 PM PDT
by grumpygresh
(Democrats delenda est. New US economy: Fascism on top, Socialism on the bottom.)

The GOP Establishment will never turn their backs on Wall Street and the “free trade” crowd. The GOP Establishment wants to be liked, and they figure that if the press doesn’t like them, then at least the mandarins occupying corporate jets and boardrooms will like them and take them grouse hunting at some corporate ranch in the west. The GOP Establishment thinks just the same as the hard lefties in the DNC, they just want to do it to us more slowly.

And the people thinking that Ted Cruz is going to actually do something about it... lemme see, a lawyer with a Harvard background. Yea, I’ll believe he really sides with the common man on this when I see him really do something.

Young people are beginning to discover, much to their dismay, that they were beyond stupid in 2008, and even more stupid in 2012. When I talk to some of these stupid young people, I’ve decided to no longer sugar-coat the issues any more. When I listen to their tales of woe and grief, I just arch my eyebrows and say “Well, you voted for this outcome, so I can’t understand your complaints. You asked for this, you got this, so...?”

They look at me as tho I’m stupid. “What do you mean, I voted for this?”

“Well, have you read the actual analysis of what’s in Obamacare?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go. This is all coming as a surprise to you because you voted for Obama and the Democrats, and you got them. Good and hard. You’re just too stupid, too lazy, (or both) to read the bill - either before or after it passed - to figure out that that entire ‘Affordable Care Act’ is one huge transfer of wealth, from you youngsters to old people.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re going to be paying far more for your health insurance than if you went into the pre-Obamacare market to buy the same sort of plan. The excess money you’ll be paying will be going towards making old people’s insurance costs go down, especially the cost of insuring old women. You voted for it, so you must support this idea.”

“!!!!!???? WTF?!”

“Oh, and you expected companies to just lay back and take the increased costs. The Democrats (for whom you voted) thought that companies would just implement this instead of moving to part-time labor. That was stupid too. 75%+ of the jobs being created now are part-time jobs. So much for predicting what corporate management would actually do.”

“But those companies are making so much money!”

“Yep, they’re making soooo much money that they’re re-hiring people after the end of the 2008 recession slower than after any recession post-WWII. They’re giving warnings on revenue. They’re increasing their earnings while the top line is mostly flat by cutting expenses - by doing things like moving people to part-time status to cut down spending on health insurance. Yep, they’re positively rolling in money. That’s why you didn’t have a job when you graduated in 2010, and that’s why you don’t have a job today. But don’t worry, Obamacare says that your parents can add you to their policy until you’re 26! That’s only, what, two years away now?”

“F... you.”

“Yep, nice talking to you, Scooter! You voted for this, you deserve it, so enjoy sleeping in your mom’s basement.”

The unions were TOLD, explicitly TOLD, by Pelosi, Reid and Obama, that they’d be able to keep their “Cadillac” plans - the type of plans with no deductible, no co-pays, etc.

The unions are now finding out that they were lied to.

That issue could really hurt the Democrats in the next two election cycles, because there’s no good way for this clown posse’ administration to undo the hit on the unions’ health care plans without bringing a lot of other questions out into the open.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.